Journey Back to the Dreamy, Gorgeous Architecture of Utopia

Architectural design by Bruce Goff—referred to in The Tale of Tomorrow as the "godfather" of the organic architecture movement. This circular interior is from the Glen Harder House in Mountain Lake, Minnesota.

The exterior of the Glen Harder House, by Bruce Goff,.with all its Asian pagoda influences, is seen here by Bruce Goff.

Architectural design by Eero Saarinen. The Trans World Flight Center remains one is his most renown designs.

The Sheats/Goldstein Residence, by John Lautner, was made widely famous in The Big Lebowski. Recently, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art bought it.

National Assembly Building of Bangladesh by Louis Kahn, is referred to in the book as his "magnum opus." It's intensely geometric and contains clever passive cooling systems.

Steel House by Robert Bruno is more sculpture than house—at least, it was to the architect. Just outside Lubbock, Texas, the structure was built up and torn down many times as Bruno chipped away at it.

Walden 7, by Ricardo Bofill, is a futuristic housing complex in Barcelona.

Les Arcades du Lac, by Ricardo Bofill, is a pedestrian-friendly, six-building housing complex stretched over an artificial lake. It was meant to alleviate the housing shortage in Saint-Quentin-En-Yvelines.

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There’s a photo in The Tale of Tomorrow, a new book about the mid-century utopian architecture movement, of a building in Jerusalem. It’s composed of hundreds of wooden, dodecahedron-shaped structures, each at least the size of a room. It’s more orderly than favela architecture, but still has an air of chaos—like the beehive of geometric modules might tumble to the ground at any moment. This is Ramot Polin, an experimental housing project that architect Zvi Hecker built in the 1970s, just after the Six Day War.

Gestalten

With Ramot Polin, Hecker envisioned a society of the future, one that shared resources, like an interior courtyard, and looked nothing like the monotonous, rectangular apartment-blocks found in cities throughout the world. For its idyllic aspirations, it certainly deserves a place in The Tale of Tomorrow. “But people hated it,” says Sofia Borges, who edited the book. “It’s so formally amazing, but the corridors were dark, it was super hot, and basically over time there’s been this really aggressive adaptation of it by the residents.”

The idea of “utopian architecture” is a fraught one. Utopia, by definition, is a place where things are perfect. But who, exactly, gets to decide what is perfect? The Tale of Tomorrow ($68) offers a more measured interpretation. First, projects should have had manifestos. Specifically, ones angled at upending the status quo. Second, these buildings should be examples of wild experimentation in design and engineering. If that experimentation happened on many levels, even better. There was no single school of utopian architecture; instead, in the book’s introduction, Borges refers to a “broad tent under which communists and individualists, engineers and artists, modernists and metabolists all gathered.”

Borges attributes the movement’s origins to the surge in scientific developments that followed World War II. “The whole Space Age had this momentum—people were on the moon!” she says. And if we could send people to the moon, the thinking went, our buildings, cars, and product designs should all convey a similar level of excitement.

Plenty of buildings in the book reflect that Space Age spirit. There are designs by renowned figures like Buckminster Fuller, but also lesser known projects—like the shingled Jacob Harder House in Mountain Lake Minnesota. It’s shaped like a UFO, and is evocative of the circular War Room from Dr. Strangelove. Other buildings pushed the limits of engineering, like St. Louis’ famous Gateway Arch. Eero Saarinen had to have equipment specially built just to erect it.

The movement began to wane towards the end of the 1970s, Borges says, as “a bit of a malaise” set in. “We sent someone to the moon one time, and then there’s a recession, and then there’s postmodernism, and the Challenger crashes, and it’s just a bit of everything,” she says.

Plenty of the structures built during the heyday of the utopian architectural movement are still standing, but many have been repurposed, and others have been abandoned. Look at Arcosanti: The 1970s-era desert community in Arizona is perhaps one of the most famous examples of design that makes a utopian statement. Its designer, Frank Lloyd Wright disciple Paolo Soleri, built it to be a self-sustaining city—a dome in the desert where thousands of people could live together, in harmony. It never really worked: after attracting a few thousand members in its early days, interest waned and people left. Today, it’s a tourist attraction.

“It doesn’t feel like that many things did stick,” Borges says of the ideas of that time. There are some notable exceptions: Apple and Google’s ambitious plans for tech campuses hark back to the era, both in terms of their spaceship-like structures and focus on sustainability. But in general, as Borges sees it, much of the high-profile experimentation in architecture today is lacking a social agenda.

“It’s forms for the sake of forms, not forms for the sake of humanity,” she says. “That’s why we’re putting this out,” she says of book, which she also refers to as “a call to arms.” “Why doesn’t our future look anything like this anymore? What could we take from these lessons, and apply going forward?”